A discipline of correspondence
A habit to keep everything tidy isn't inborn. It is being taught, and lessons aren't always pleasant.
Email is an important means of communication and a great tool of organizing all the workflow. If you wish to know how much a person is accustomed to a good discipline of mind, just look at how the person's mail is being kept.
An immense, almost never cleaned up inbox file is what is most commonly seen. A pile of letters, both important and volatile, personal and business ones. Unless forced to move all the message to relevant folders, such people would never do that themselves.
Big mailboxes aren't good; apart from the fact they contain mostly garbage, as time goes by, they slow down system and start to become a security issue as well.
Inboxes are temporary storage place, this should be taught to every person using business email boxes. Let's see how our network monitoring software might help to introduce this concept into the mind of every employee.
To see, but not to read
If a Un*x type of server is used to run a mail server, the overall security may not be compromised. To monitor individual mailboxes, we should use an approach when
- the process checking inbox sizes may not read the inbox files themselves
- checking doesn't assume granting any additional privileges
- users must be warned individually when/if the inbox size are too big
This task is simple.
First, let's create a domain user (since we are using NT domain), or use an existing domain user having been created for technical purposes.
Second, create a network share on the mail server, visible only to the mentioned user, and operating in read-only mode. The share must provide a read-only access to the inbox directory.
Third, create a host in IPHost Network Monitor you are using to monitor your intranet and add individual monitors for every mailbox we plan to watch. A monitor is of «file» type and refers to the inbox file name.
The last and most important part: create a custom alert and use the monitor name (matching the user part of an email box) to send an alert to when the condition (file is bigger than a given value) is met.
Now you can not only watch the mailboxes won't grow too big, but alert the users themselves.
Can you offer a simpler solution?
